a knitting blog with occasional side trips

Category Archives: beading

While the knitting putters along (the front and back of the Wedge Pullover are blocking as I write this), I made another detour into beading. This is the Bali Rope Bracelet, the last of my purchases from when my local bead store closed this spring. While beading is much faster than knitting or crochet, I thought this would take a while. I pictured having to do some sort of complicated threading or weaving to get many small silver beads to form that rope pattern. In fact, I’ve been putting off tackling the project because I figured it was going to be a major investment of effort (by beading standards).

Bali Rope Bracelet.

No, it’s a trick. Those aren’t tiny round beads woven together, but a lot of heishi beads lined up in a row. Each bead naturally nestles at a 45º angle to the one next to it, creating the illusion that you’ve made a thick silver cord. Seven Swarovski crystals add color and sparkle. I had to shorten the bracelet by about an inch to fit my wrist, but then, that’s easy to do when you’re custom-making the bracelet. Oh, and the entire project, start to finish, was about 40 minutes. Now to find an outfit to wear my new pretty sparkly thing with.

Like this:

One of our local bead stores closed the branch closest to me earlier this year. I don’t bead much, but I had filled one of their loyalty cards, so I made a last trip to use it. Once I got my loot home, though, I put it away and promptly forgot about it. Oops. But over the past couple of weeks, I’ve wanted to wear the earrings I intended to make with some of the beads I bought, and I finally made time to work on them this morning.

Fluorite, fluorite, and more fluorite.

Simple beading continues to be a great instant gratification craft. There isn’t much I can knit in half an hour or so, much less knit three versions of it. Nor will these require washing or blocking afterwards, although since the findings are silver, I’ll have to polish them occasionally.

As the caption says, all three pairs are fluorite beads. It may not show well in the picture, but the leftmost pair are a lavender so pale that they may pass as colorless, the center pair are green with a purple stripe—like certain hand knit socks, they’re fraternal twins, not identical—and the pair on the right are a more-or-less uniform pale green.

I did bring home more beads than that, of course. For instance, there’s a pair of amethyst beads ready to become a pair of truly purple earrings once I remember where I stored my silver posts. (See, you can tell this isn’t my major hobby because I don’t know where something that basic is. Trust me, I know where my knitting supplies are. Most of them, anyway.) But I’m happy to wait until the mood strikes again to tackle those future projects—or until I find those posts.

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While I was doing my level best to feed my knitting habit while not making any sweaters, I ended up knitting a series of smaller projects. This is the Harmonia’s Rings Cowl made from Malabrigo Merino Worsted (the color is Forest). I was delighted to finally have something I wanted to make that I could use a Malabrigo yarn for. I love the feel of the yarn, but I haven’t trusted it to hold up with heavy use. But surely a cowl won’t be subject to much friction.

Harmonia's Rings Cowl

This project has a slightly more distinguished pedigree in my personal history than most projects I tackle. The first time I ever saw it was when Cat Bordhi was wearing it at a Yarnover a few years ago. So yes, the HRC is based on the Möbius strip. Unlike my last Möbius scarf, this time I didn’t get too many twists into the cast-on (yay!). You work the HRC from the top down. It starts out as a bit of Möbius knitting while you build up the bit around the neck. You then “break” the Möbius strip and rejoin, now working in the round like usual, increasing at intervals to allow it to spill down over the shoulders.

A close-up of the beaded picot edge.

This is the first time I’ve done any beaded knitting. The top edge of the HRC is a line of beaded picots. The pattern says to use seed beads and a size 14 crochet hook to get them on the yarn. No, I wasn’t foresighted enough to have a size 14 crochet hook on hand when I reached the picots. I did have a size 10 hook which was small enough to fit through the beads, but it was too large to pull the yarn back through. My solution was to loop a length of dental floss around the yarn. I pulled the dental floss through the bead with the size 10 hook and then pulled on the floss to bring the yarn itself through.

It’s been working pretty well as a cowl. The designer says that you can pull it up over your head, but I think my neck is too long or something since when I tried that, it felt strained and awkward. It’s quite warm and the wool is soft enough not to bother me when it touches bare skin. And I really like the design itself. It hugs the neck so that cold air doesn’t get in, and since it’s not one of those loose, drapey cowls, it doesn’t dangle in my way when I lean forward. Now if I could just suppress my urge to get it all straightened out—impossible where a Möbius is concerned!

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I made it back to the bead store for the first time this year. (Do beaders refer to their local bead store as an LBS the way knitters and crocheters call their local yarn store an LYS?) I left with only one kit, not so much because I was practicing self-restraint as because they’ve only created a few new kits since I decimated their stock last year and only one of the new batch was one I was interested in. This kit, Santa Fe, makes a necklace that can also be worn as a bracelet (or perhaps it’s a bracelet that can also work as a necklace). It’s not my normal style of jewelry, but I liked the colorway (Spring; they also sell a reddish-golden colorway called Autumn) and there was just something about the scatteredness of it that appealed to me.

Santa Fe necklace, single strand

Assembling this kit was a different challenge for me than I usually find with beading projects. Technically, it wasn’t difficult: thread the included beads onto the beading wire, making sure that the charms fall at certain points so that they’ll hang in the proper places when it’s worn as a necklace, then attach the lobster clasp and jump ring. Where I was challenged was in the very scatteredness that had attracted me to it in the first place. The designers figure you’ll use the photo of their sample just to give yourself ideas on how to mix the beads and that your creativity will spill out as you play with it.

Santa Fe necklace, double strand. Note how now the charms are centered relative to the clasp.

I’m quite willing to believe that other people are blessed with inspiration when given suggestions like that. Me, I have an addiction to symmetry. Left up to my own devices, this necklace was going to be mostly symmetrical, only not quite, because the beads weren’t going to come out right, and the whole effect was going to disappoint me. So I ended up following the sample photo slavishly. I’d say there’s about 99% similarity between them. I am inordinately proud of the one bead I put in on impulse. But overall, I’m happy with the results, which leaves me wondering which is “better,” to basically copy the original and enjoy the necklace, or go off on my own and end up beating myself up for not being naturally random.

Santa Fe necklace as bracelet (5 wraps)

Oh, and after all that fuss, I’ll probably end up wearing as a necklace more than a bracelet, even though when I bought the kit, I thought it would be the other way around. With actual wear, some loops become loose, others tighten up, and I’m worried that I’ll snag it on something and break it. But I do have ideas for a future one . . . that is, one that I come up with on my own, and have to be all asymmetrical and randomish with by myself!

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As the year winds down, I’m finishing off the beading projects. This is the last of the beading kits I bought this summer, the Rock Fall Necklace. It was pretty simple to assemble, making it a great project for filling in a bit of the time before Thanksgiving really got going.

As usual, the instructions didn’t name the stones involved, so I got to play Guess the Crystal again. I think the white, flat bead on the left is mother-of-pearl and I’m certain the teardrop-shaped one in the center is rose quartz. That leaves the round bead on the right, and I have no clue as to what it might be. I get why the instructions never list the stones, since the same instructions are used for a variety of colorways which use different stones, but it’s still a mite frustrating.

Anyway, assembling the necklace was quick, especially as this time I had all the parts promised. After working my way through the Palisades Necklace, I’ve had plenty of practice twisting eyepins into loops, and that went much better this time—the loops were round when I finished, not strangely flattened ovals! Use jump rings to connect the beads to the bigger ring, string a leather cord through the ring, slide a bead down to decorate the knot and add fasteners to the cord. Now I just need to let the necklace hang for a bit to get the kinks out of the leather cord (the beads and all are so light that their weight alone isn’t instantly pulling the leather straight).

Okay, the bead store now has an entire winter to come up with new bead kits that I’d like to make. [drums fingers] You’re working on this, people, right? Right?

Like this:

Today was the first day after Daylight Savings Time ended for the year, and having the sun set an hour earlier cut into my beading time just as I suspected it would. I figured I’d better press ahead with another beading kit while there was still some light to work by. This time around, I chose to work on the Palisades Necklace. It looks fairly simple, but it ended up taking longer than I expected to complete.

The construction of the necklace is fairly straightforward: thread an eyepin through each bead and cut and bend it to form a second loop. Then use bits of chain to link the beads together. However, it takes time to bend nineteen eyepins. And those links of chain came as a single strand that had to be cut apart oh so carefully, lest you clip the wrong link and ruin a section. I dropped one section and nearly didn’t find it again—eek! This project did end up using all the beading tools I’d bought, so now I feel justified in having bought them! The one drawback to the project was that before I knew it, most of the (now shorter) afternoon had passed. So much for getting anything else done today.

I believe the beads are fluorite, although again, there’s nothing in the kit to identify them. It’s going to be a bit of a challenge to find a sweater that can set off all those shades, from almost white to deepest purple.

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Overall, I’m really having fun putting these bead kits together. I almost never knit or crochet from kits, but it’s different for beading somehow (probably has something to do with the fact that compared to my knitting/crocheting experience, I’m a beading novice). But there’s this one little problem with the bead kits: more often than not, a bead is missing or deformed or something. I understand that the bead store employees are probably putting these together by hand and I’m sure they blur after a while, but I seem to have an uncanny talent for buying the one kit out of several available in which all is not as it should be. And being a beading novice, it throws me, whereas when something goes wrong in knitting, I have enough experience to work my way past it.

Well, I worked my way past this kit’s problem, although it was less my growing experience and more my growing stash of leftover findings that saved me. The Charmed Life necklace kit is supposed to include two small jump rings, one medium jump ring, and one large jump ring, among other things. My particular kit had one small ring, two medium rings, and no large ring whatsoever. I was able to substitute a medium ring for the missing small ring—since all the charms pile on top of each other, that change won’t be noticeable. And thanks to now having done several projects, I actually have some jump rings in my supplies, one of which I was able to substitute in (barely, because it was almost too big) for the large ring.

And so I present the Charmed Life necklace. It comes in several colorways (do beaders say “colorways”?), but I fell for the purple one. I think the large teardrop bead and the round bead are both amethysts. I know nothing more about the little sparkly crystal than that it’s a little sparkly crystal. And as for what the kit calls a “bezel set crystal,” I can’t tell if it’s also a semi-precious stone, or just a bit of dark purple glass. I think the silver feather makes a nice contrast to all these beads and I hope it doesn’t end up hidden by the teardrop bead all the time. The teardrop worries me a bit. The silver bail you top it with had tiny teeth and I hope they’re strong enough to hold it through normal wear and tear. I mean, you pinch the bail onto the bead with your fingers: that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. But right now it’s intact and I’m waiting for the kind of weather where I wear plain sweaters, so that I can try this necklace for real.

Like this:

As we head towards winter, I feel an urge to get the beading projects wrapped up. Winter just feels like more of a knitting season. Pragmatically, there’s a lighting issue to consider: I need more light to bead than to knit, and with it getting darker sooner, my beading time is shrinking. And winter is the season I wear sweaters that can set necklaces off nicely, so I may as well have the necklaces ready to go when the temperature drops. So while I waited for the rice cooker to cook some quinoa (yes, I’m experimenting with the kitchen technology again), I tackled the River Rock Necklace.

The bottom half of the necklace was familiar territory. While the beads were larger than what I’ve been dealing with, the whole bit about stringing beads onto beading wire and finishing off the ends with crimp beads and some sort of endpiece has been integral to every bit of beading I’ve done this summer. The biggest challenge here was trying to decide what order to string the beads in. I wish the bead store had listed the gemstones involved, although since each kit is a random assortment of beads, this would’ve been prohibitive. I’m guessing that the clear white one is quartz and the clear purplish ones are amethyst. After that, it’s all a mystery.

Using leather in jewelry was completely new to me. For this necklace, you bring a strips of rawhide through the metal loops, tie them close to the loop with pieces of thin suede and then cover the ends with cord ends. That was something of a struggle, since the two leather ends are basically plumper than the cord end. You’re supposed to twist the cord end onto the leather, sort of like twisting a cap onto a bottle. I’m pretty sure the loop end is fine, but the hook end might not be all that secure. Maybe that’s why you tie the rawhide with the suede, so that if an end does slip free, the suede tie will keep the rawhide from pulling out through the ring.

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Really, given how many books I’m reading at one time, I can hardly have too many bookmarks.

It was easier to make the bookmark than to take its picture. Today’s been cloudy, which doesn’t give me good light for photography, and to take a picture this close up, I probably should use the tripod (and didn’t). So it’s a little hard to see the elements on the charm, but clockwise from upper left, they’re Water, Air, Earth, and Fire. Pair the charm with a few Swarovski crystals, and ta-da! A fun little quickie project.